Been a while since an update to this blog, my provider got hacked and people were getting a redirect to some questionable site (I still can’t show images, if someone knows a fix please let me know).
Should be better now, I just wish the people doing the hacking would devote their considerable skills to helping out humanity…
Anyway, there are some impressive new scores at storageperformance.org, with the usual crazy configurations of thousands of drives etc.
Regarding price/performance:
When looking at $/IOP, make sure you are comparing list price (look at the full disclosure report, that has all the details for each config).
Otherwise, you could get the wrong $/IOP since some vendors have list prices, others show heavy discounting.
For example, a box that does $6.5/IOP after 50% discounting, would be $13/IOP using list prices.
Regarding RAID:
As I have mentioned in other posts, RAID plays a big role in both protection and performance.
All SPC-1 results are using RAID10, with the notable exception of NetApp (we use RAID-DP, mathematically analogous to RAID6 in protection).
Here’s a (very) rough way to convert a RAID10 result to RAID6, if the vendor you’re looking for doesn’t have a RAID6 result:
- SPC-1 is about 60% writes.
- Take any RAID10 result, let’s say 200,000 IOPS.
- 60% of that is 120,000, that’s the write ops. 40% is the reads, or 80,000 read ops.
- If using RAID6, you’d be looking at roughly a 4x slowdown for the writes: 120,000/4 = 30,000
- Add that to the 40% of the reads and you get the final result:
- 80,000 reads + 30,000 writes = 110,000 RAID6-corrected SPC-1 IOPS. Which is almost half the RAID10 result…
Just make sure you’re comparing apples to apples, that’s all. I know we all suffer from ADD in this age of information overload, but do spend some time going through the full disclosure, since there’s always interesting stuff in there…
D